“Pandemic recovery plans cannot simply work to bring economies back to their pre-COVID status,” said Katrina Fotovat, Senior Official in the Office of Global Women’s Issues at the U.S. Department of State. She spoke at a recent event hosted by the Wilson Center’s Maternal Health Initiative and Middle East Project in collaboration with EMD Serono, the healthcare business of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany, on recognizing women’s paid and unpaid work during COVID-19 recovery. Economic recovery plans must include the most undervalued industries and marginalized workers, especially women, she said.

Caregiving and the Care Economy

The pandemic brought into focus not only women’s disproportionate concentration in the hardest-hit sectors, but also the contribution of care work and women’s unpaid and invisible labor to not only the economy, but also to families, said C. Nicole Mason, President and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “It also served to highlight our broken care infrastructure,” she said. Amid lockdowns, school closures, and layoffs, women have borne the brunt of caretaking roles and responsibilities. Their departure from the workforce reflects this dynamic. In the United States alone, an alarming number of women, almost 3 million women, have exited the labor market, said Fotovat, because they were forced to choose between employment and providing care for loved ones.

The unpaid care sector is the backbone that supports paid employment, said Lara Ayoub, Co-founder of SADAQA, Jordan, and Communications Specialist for Arab States at the United Nations Development Coordination Office. As economies and societies around the world rebuild from the wreckage of COVID-19, policies and practices must aim to revitalize women’s paid work while also compensating for their unpaid work. Investing in care work as part of the infrastructure of the post-pandemic economy and safeguarding worker protections, such as paid leave, would elevate the vital labor that falls to women, said Fotovat.

The Role of Civil Society, Government, and the Private Sector

Jordan saw 20,000 women lose their jobs during the pandemic, said Ayoub. Structural barriers, including a lack of daycares, limited access to safe public transportation, and unequal pay led to women’s mass exodus from the workforce, she said.

To tackle these barriers, SADAQA, a civil society women-led organization led a coalition to amend a national law that required organizations to provide childcare based on the number of women with young children working there. By changing the language of the law so it referred to the number of employees instead of the number of women, SADAQA successfully advocated for childcare to be considered a gender-neutral responsibility, said Ayoub. This move also helped increase the number of provided daycares since men make up the majority of paid workers in Jordan.

Governments play an important role in improving women’s health and economic participation in society. In the United States, to address gender equity at the federal level, the Biden Administration established the White House Gender Policy Council. It’s the highest-level council in our nation’s history to report directly to the president on gender, said Fotovat. One of the council’s first tasks was to draft the U.S. government’s first national gender equity and equality strategy. It prioritizes improving economic security; preventing and responding to gender-based violence; increasing access to healthcare; and advancing democracy, rights, and the full participation of women and girls in social, economic, civic, and political life, she said.

Although the COVID-19 recovery is typically framed in terms of what the government can do, the private sector can also develop supportive workforce policies that benefit women, said Jasmine Greenamyer, Head of Global Strategic Partnerships in Global Healthcare Government & Public Affairs at EMD Serono. While the private sector can’t create public policy, we can create policies that help our employees, she said. “And if this is done at the mass level, we can significantly improve the lives of women who are so often disproportionately impacted by these economic events that we’ve recently seen,” said Greenamyer.

The Power of Collective Pressure

The private sector could also work jointly with other organizations to advance women’s health and economic participation. As a private sector partner, EMD Serono is serious about advancing these priorities internally and also sees the inordinate importance of private sector partnerships to create systemic policy support for women who make up the majority of underpaid and unpaid caregivers, she said. EMD Serono collaborated with the U.S. government, other governments, employers, and experts to develop a Healthy Women, Healthy Economies policy toolkit, which provides many gender-specific policy options that partner economies could draw from, pilot, and scale up in order to remove barriers to women’s health and economic participation, said Greenamyer.

Dedicated budgets and policies to rebuild from the “she-cession” are paramount. While concrete strategies are needed to implement gender equality and equity, without gender budgeting, they are meaningless, said Fotovat. “So, it’s great to have strategies, but if you’re not resourcing them, they really are unlikely to happen,” she said. “And we see this all over the world.” Every country, civil society organization, advocate, and activist should push for the inclusion of gender in national budgets and agendas, said Ayoub.

Bringing equity to care work will require changing norms and expectations around caregiving. For women’s groups that seek to change cultural values, the media can be a powerful tool and partner, said Fotovat. When daycares in Jordan were shut down twice during the pandemic—including during a three-month lockdown—they turned to social media. “We crafted a Twitter storm. Twice,” said Ayoub.  Families, caregivers, and activists all joined in using a special hashtag to successfully pressure officials into reopening the daycares, she said.

Without macro-level support, some sectors, like the care sector, will vanish because they were not protected, said Ayoub. In this worst case scenario, losing the care sector risks damaging the entire fabric of a country’s economy.

Read more:

• Women’s work has been undervalued during the COVID-19 pandemic
• The care burden: how to compensate women’s unpaid care work
• Working women are doubly challenged by their caregiving and professional responsibilities